Mon, 07/17/2023 - 10:55pm
Irregular Warfare Education “A lifelong Process”
By Paul Burton
“If traditional Warfare is checkers with violence, Irregular Warfare is not just chess, it is nine simultaneous chess games where pawn to queen four in one game affects the other eight games, every move has a symbiotic relationship with each other”. Author Afghanistan 2004
Checker games are short, and although they do require a strategy the complexity in contrast with chess is incomparable. The complication of nine games of chess is significant, but if your peer competitor plays “Go” (Henry Kissinger), we now have game board disconnect. How does the Department of Defense prepare strategic and operational level thinkers to link these board games and win? Can policy makers even define what winning is? The education process to enable successful Irregular Warfare (IW) campaigning is lengthy and does not fit into the traditional professional military education model, it is an iterative lifelong learning process that combines several pillars: a unique pedagogy, didactic, methodology, a form of classical liberal arts education, self-study, and experience. Those fundamental foundations provide the skills to think, plan, and execute in the realm of IW campaigning.
The Department of Defense has educational infrastructure, the comparison of educational budget to training budget is clearly disproportionate. Additionally, decades of focus on Violent Extremist Organizations have created a dearth in intellectual thought with regards to IW. Many of our interagency counterparts lack the capability and capacity to advance IW education which inhibits the execution of IW campaigns against peer’s because they are integral to the execution in protracted struggles. This is particularly concerning since many of these agencies' policy makers should help define the political objectives that the military will help accomplish. I will delimit this article to a discussion primarily focused on Army Special Operations Forces (SOF) education not training.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/index.php/jrnl/art/irregular-warfare-education-lifelong-process
